East Austin church up for sale

AUSTIN, Texas - The quaint 72-year-old church sits on a corner in a residential neighborhood of 1181 Greenwood Avenue.

It doesn’t take much to notice the white paint chipping or the cracks on the walls that reveal its true age.

Pastor Clarence Jones has led the Greater St. John's Baptist Church congregation for 30-years.

“We’ve done a lot of activities here and a lot of children have grown up in this church and became young good adults, a lot of good history here," said Reverend Jones.

Willie Jones who is a relative of the reverend spent some of his childhood worshiping the lord behind those walls.

"Yeah I spent some of my childhood at the church," said Willie.

Willie said he’s noticed the church dwindle down over the years.

"Everything is breaking you can barely hold on to rail up there and it's going to break," said Willie.

Another problem the church is encountering is the lack of parking along with the changing neighborhood and expensive property taxes.

"It’s more of a student type of neighborhood, University of Texas students are moving in the area and their building lots of duplex homes and town homes," said Rev. Jones.

Reverend Jones and the congregation decided last year to put the church up for sale and find another place to call home.

"We are going to re-establish and buy land and hopefully get a steel church building to worship in," said Rev. Jones.

Churchgoer Bobie Ball said it’s time to move on.

"We need to get another place because we don't have parking and their bringing in all these new houses," said Ball.

There have been potential buyers and offers made but the church didn’t think it was the right offer said Rev. Jones.

"We couldn't sell it for the price we had originally but the church thought we could get a little more so we held off on the offer," said Rev. Jones.

Churchgoers said it's not about the walls it's about the people that come together for worship that keeps them together.

"It's about the team not the place. You can wrap this up in a book of history because this is done for because everything is breaking down. The only thing that's new is this sign that invites people in we got two years ago," said Willie.